The More You Ignore Me

by Travis Nichols

  No one understood . . .

  Enough.

  ENOUGH!

  Stop pulling at me, readers, stop tugging with your phantom fingers my very bones.

  I won’t let you jerk them out of my body to suck the marrow dry!

  Do you think I can’t feel it?

  You can’t have me!

  Some things remain private.

  What else do you want me to divulge?

  Don’t you have enough by this point to satisfy your wretched needs?

  Stop reading, why don’t you?

  Go away!

  Leave me alone!

  Ah, but why worry?

  You don’t know a thing.

  Read on if you must.

  Take it!

  It’s nothing.

  The real me escapes every time.

  I can’t stop your pursuit, I know.

  You will continue to press yourselves into me in a vain attempt to understand this real me, but you will only find wisps of smoke and embers at the end of your journey, just like my mother.

  Thirty years ago, she read the “hurtful” things I had written about her in my private journal, and our relationship was ruined forever after.

  What did I write?

  Was it my fault, after all?

  Wouldn’t you like to know, hateful reader, but I’ll never tell, for some things, I’ve learned, must remain private, for their revelation destroys, such as was the case when I put too much trust in my mother’s virtue.

  I had such a journal then—leather bound with a black binding, gold-embossed lettering on the front declaring it to be “My Personal Journal” in cursive lettering—and I filled it with every transmission, every thought, every argument that caromed down the colonnades of my mind.

  Some days I would simply look back over the pages and marvel at my erudition and wit, just as you surely do here, but then one morning—a wet Saturday in drab November—I absentmindedly left this journal on the shabby afghan atop my twin bed in my room while I went out for my weekly trip to the record store to—I remember it so well!—see what new arrivals the doughy clerk had chucked in the bins.

  When I returned, I knew what hell was.

  For years afterwards, dread and paranoia lurked behind my writing hand, for any word or combination of words might be exposed, misunderstood once again, inviting my mother’s wrath, streaking sobs and pleading, tearing fingernails and lipsticked teeth upon me like a briney fisherman’s net, suffocating me ever more despite my thrashing.

  In fact, my behavior toward Corn and Rachil can be partially explained by this dread, if one cared to explain it.

  My mother said I had “ruined everything” and that she was “horrified” by what I had written, though surely no adolescent boy had NOT had similar thoughts, though I do know now that not every adolescent boy has the mind or courage to explore them.

  Think of the safety I must have felt that I COULD explore such thoughts!

  Isn’t that worth anything?

  Well, that safety was exploded by prying eyes.

  Once my words had been wrenched from their private world, I no longer felt in control of the narrative of my life, and for someone who had long considered himself a master of narrative, this was a crushing blow; I spent the rest of my time in that house shuffling along in a stupor, the two of us, my mother and I, avoiding each other at all costs until the day I moved out with only a JanSport backpack, a Walkman, and a sense of integrity to my name.

  My “story” by that time had become not the one I told myself privately, but rather some misbegotten version dimly perceived by an overemotional harpy.

  I felt for years I was doomed to be misunderstood, and, the worst tragedy was further writing and “expression” only seemed to make it worse.

  Since all I had ever done was write in an attempt to give shape to what felt like the lurching chaos of my time, without writing I was only an empty shell of myself, pasted down by depression and lethargy.

  All because of my “journal”!

  *

  Dear readers, I’ve recessed—no, that is not the right word—recused?—yes—recused—I have recused myself from continuing this comment.

  I have become too caught up in the frenzy, and I find myself trying to impress you (why?) and therefore lying to you, saying things at a frenzied clip that are not true, which make me sound as base and vile as the creature I have sworn myself against.

  This fact, which I admit only came upon me gradually, like some kind of neuralgia, has shaken me to my core.

  Every act, understand, from the click of a keystroke to the slinging of a Molotov cocktail, has importance.

  Let’s not forget the sparrow.

  I believe in the sparrow.

  There is judgment.

  I’m not so childish as to believe in an old man God with a white beard and robe like a movie Zeus in sandals watching the actions of the world with a dispassionate eye, but there is a judging presence.

  I believe in justice.

  And while I am sure that time will ultimately take care of the unjust, I am sensitive.

  When injustice appears in my world, it affects me.

  It is uncomfortable, to say the least.

  My back aches, my scalp itches.

  I develop ulcers in my mouth, gas pains in my abdominal region.

  My jaw clenches for hours.

  I get painful daylong erections and headaches.

  I would gladly suffer if I felt that simple suffering were the purpose, but once I speak out, once I do in fact act against injustices—all in a flash my symptoms disappear.

  It’s as if my entire being goes slack like a rag doll and a startling peace overtakes me.

  It’s as if I have just awoken in a dewy field with the summer sun on my naked body.

  This is the presence of the divine judge acknowledging my work.

  I’m sure of it.

  The divine is acknowledging me, my existence, and it is forgiving me my past injustices.

  But only because I am now on the righteous path.

  It may come as a surprise, but these feelings—the overwhelming discomfort and torpor—I did not always know the proper way to relieve them.

  I am ashamed.

  I am guilty.

  There’s nothing you can say or do to make me feel any less shame or guilt, which is why it makes so little sense for me to have lied to you.

  I can’t expect you to understand, but your immediate understanding has never been my goal.

  There is more to the story.

  Those boys.

  They were not quite as I’ve described them, it’s true, but I wasn’t completely dishonest about them, either.

  I may have misrepresented things.

  But how ominous I sound!

  That’s all so far in the past, I don’t even know why I’m prattling on and on about it, burrowing into that pulsing, crazed tunnel of memory—and for what?

  So that I might confess to you my sins?

  As if you deserve it?

  One should confess to a priest or a shaman, not some silly pack of girls on the internet!

  Of course I mean no offense, and I hope you embrace both your silliness and your girlishness, for not everyone is so lucky as to be afforded the luxury of either!

  I see you there with your coltish charm, looking offended, wishing you could go back to the original blog post as if you had never entered into my comment.

  Don’t be offended!

  I am flattering you!

  Take it!

  I admit that I wake up some mornings with phrases chattering through my mind.

  Passwords perhaps?

  I go to the wedding site and I try them out, but so far the transmissions have been imperfect.

  What would I do if I were able to infiltrate the enemy?

  I’ve dreamt of simply adding a choice comma to the latest egregious excretion, of copying all the back-end text and redeploying it on my own site, to take it over under anot
her name, but my choicest fantasy is simply to delete, to delete all with a series of joyous keystrokes and clicks—so effortless!—each one like ballast thrown over the bow of my soul.

  Just to write it leaves me nearly breathless.

  But alas.

  The passwords do not work, and it is worse that I have tried.

  Afterwards I am brought terribly low by a feeling of futility.

  The site rages on and each posting, every comment, is a direct attack on my psyche.

  Must I run away to maintain my sanity?

  No, of course not.

  But what can I do?

  Any reaction will only embolden that wretched sack of excrescence, and so I must outwardly be perceived as ignoring him—oh yes it is nothing ho hum I never even think of it—and somehow try to stay ahead of the game.

  So I publish my own series of sites with just my name printed over and over and over again.

  I must admit that I am powerless to do anything else.

  The feeling is eerily similar to a kind of overwhelming guilt.

  When guilt becomes overwhelming does it turn to shame?

  Very well then, shame.

  I will admit there are things I am ashamed of, things I have done or in some cases—so much worse, I realize now!—allowed to happen.

  How could it be worse to have not done some terrible act than to have done it?

  If you have to ask, then I’m afraid you are more pitifully naïve than I first thought.

  The site is at zero. I should have seen the signs.

  When confronted with this volatile mix of intelligence and creativity, that niggling functionary should have only sat back in awe, but very slowly he realized that his role as facilitator and moderator was not enough for him—he wanted control!

  He wanted glory!

  He wanted fame and a name for himself and so he stopped dealing with me honestly.

  He put my comments “in moderation” for days at a time so a long queue would build up—maddening!—and then he began to delete, systematically erasing me from the conversation.

  I should have known that once he was pressed he would revert to type, a deluded usher for the status quo, no better than any of the myriad other site moderators and administrators who have given me a similar ticket.

  Doesn’t anyone have courage?

  Won’t anyone else stand up to these fiends?

  I ask, but of course I know the answers already.

  There is no one.

  Not every night, but most, I dream of pursuit.

  Sometimes it’s a ridiculous stock character from a popular entertainment—the Blob, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the 50 Foot Woman—but it always moves slowly and methodically in stark contrast to my hysterical huffing and puffing to get away.

  The feeling is real, and more often than not I awaken after I have been cornered—finally and fatally—by my pursuer.

  It would be naïve to think this pursuit did not continue into my waking life.

  I am pursued.

  Ever so badly I would like to be found out, to be caught, so whatever the pursuer wishes done to me could be done, and then whatever is next would come, the pursuit finally over.

  A cascade of relief falls over me at that simple thought, the imagined falling away of this perpetual fear, like a car encrusted with a layer of ice and snow out on the interstate for an hour until finally—in a flash of white and sparkle—the trapezoidal weight flies free, end over end, plunges down, and finally smashes in a burst on the road just passed, behind, gone for good.

  I’m nearly weeping as I write this—no, I admit it, I am weeping—just to think there could be an end to the feeling.

  Of course, there is occasional respite but no real end.

  I know, even as we head into a new decade, that the pursuit will continue.

  It is inside.

  And so it is endless.

  COLOPHON

  The More You Ignore Me was designed at

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  The text is set in Adobe Caslon.

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